on this week’s Wire In The Blood. First a super arty shot with mirrors, then another super arty noir shot though blinds, then bloody handhelds.
Dear Sir or Madam, you are distracting from the narrative. Knock it off.
Ta.
Article written by :: (RSS)
9 responses to “Cinematographers gone wild”
The commenting period has expired for this post. If you wish to re-open the discussion, please do so in the latest Open Thread.
I have a middle ear disorder so the rise in hand-held camera work is seriously cutting into the shows and movies that don’t make me throw up. I take travel sickness medication before going to the cinema, but it’s not always enough!
Well said, tigtog. I find Robson Green’s mannerisms and the frequent appearances of dead people equally distracting, to the extent that constant distraction from the narrative becomes almost a signature of the show.
I can’t watch this any more. I am one of Val McDermid’s greatest fans (I even met her once), and I liked earlier series. But the ‘Asbergersy’ quirkiness of Tony has become just weirdness and the plots are **much** too far out there for me. Yuk.
I can see that up to a point, although it fits with the novels well enough. The novels are, primarily, about Tony Hill, so it’s fair enough that his psyche is as much a star of the show as the actual police procedural.
It’s just that for me, the narrative of Hill’s quirks juxtaposed against the discovery of the killer works best when the rest of the photography is very minimalist.
Hey M-H, our comments crossed.
I haven’t been reading the latest books, I confess, so I’m not sure how closely the current TV episodes follow the book plots (the earliest episodes followed the various novels quite closely).
Are the TV scriptwriters perhaps generating plots faster than McDiarmid can write quality books?
But Robson Green(e?) has got much, much quirkier and jumpier and off-putting as the show has gone on, to the point where I was wondering tonight whose idea it was and whether the director was trying to make him push it further or trying to make him tone it down.
Also, I went right off him when he said to Andrew Denton that what he was thinking about when he was making love to his gorgeous blonde wife was that he had her and other men didn’t. You want squick, that’s way worse than the cannibals and so on.
I also found myself wondering tonight just who was in control of this episode. It was exceptionally jerky, wasn’t it? Yet last week’s episode did not distract my concentration so.
I missed the Andrew Denton interview: ewwwwww.
Not only was it exceptionally jerky, it was also unrelievedly corpse-coloured, except for the bonkers stark-white scenes.
Last week’s ep was quite close to one strand of one of the more recent novels, the ‘Nazi experimental psychologists’ narrative.
I have no idea what this program is, but I have to say that ‘artistic’ or ‘avant-garde’ television cinematography is frustrating as hell to me as an aspiring director and as a viewer. After a certain point, they do nothing to the narrative.
I gotta say that Bryan Singer and the House team have managed to keep their cinematography interesting without falling to handhelds, too many digital filters, and angles that make your head hurt.